Sniff Your Local LoRa Packets

As the LoRa low-bandwidth networking technology in license-free spectrum has gained traction on the wave of IoT frenzy, LoRa networks have started to appear in all sorts of unexpected places. Sometimes they are open networks such as The Things Network, other times they are commercially available networks, and then, of course, there are entirely private LoRa installations.

If you are interested in using LoRa on a particular site, it’s an interesting exercise to find out what LoRa traffic already exists, and to that end [Joe Broxson] has put together a useful little device. Hardware wise it’s an Adafruit Cortex M0 Feather with onboard LoRa module, paired with a TFT FeatherWing for display, and software wise it scans a set of available frequencies and posts any packets it finds to the scrolling display. It also has the neat feature of logging packets in detail to an SD card for later analysis. The whole is enclosed in a 3D printed case from an Adafruit design and makes for a very attractive self-contained unit.

Long range – multiple kilometers
Low power – can last months (or even years) on a battery
Low cost – less than 20€ CAPEX per node, almost no OPEX
Low bandwidth – something like 400 bytes per hour
Coverage everywhere – you are the network! Just install your own gateways
Secure – 128bit end-to-end encrypted

The LoRaWAN no list:

Realtime data – you can only send small packets every couple of minutes
Phone calls – you can do that with GPRS/3G/LTE
Controlling lights in your house – check out ZigBee or BlueTooth
Sending photos, watching Netflix – check out WiFi
Geolocation / Triangulation – you should probably use GPS for this, but we’re doing our best to make it work with only LoRa. Might take a few years though.

Most likely it would be encrypted, at least if LoRaWAN is involved (such as when using The Things Network or most other networks). And even if it wouldn’t use LoRaWAN, if properly implemented, it would still be encrypted, so no. (And indeed, LoRa doesn’t really make sense for this application..)